The multimillionaire men of Lehman

On Friday, the LA Times published the of pay for Lehman Brothers’ top 50 employees in 2007. That’s employees as in managing directors and below: pay for “named corporate officers” like Dick Fuld was publicly disclosed. This is how much you make if you’re not running the company, but just working there and making lots of money.

While LAT’s originals contain lots of interesting information like year-over-year comparisons, they’re not easy to read, and not searchable. So, as a public service, Ben Walsh put together the list in searchable form.

It’s worth noting a bunch of people with incredibly vague job titles like “MD, Executive Administration” (Benoit Savoret, $18 million in 2007.) These are managers — and pretty important ones, judging by their paychecks — yet not important enough that their pay needs to be disclosed to the SEC or to investors. Collectively, they’re more perpetrators than victims when it comes to the financial crisis: they can all live quite happily for the rest of their lives on what they made in that one single year.

To get into the Lehman Top 50 in 2007, you needed to be earning more than $8.2 million a year — that’s $158,000 a week. One man earned $9 million, six men earned $10 million, and four men earned $11 million, with no one earning anything in between: Lehman clearly found it easiest to round up or down to the nearest million. You know, as you do.

Of course, there’s nothing special about Lehman, in terms of pay. If we saw the Top 50 list for a really big investment bank, like JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs, it would have higher salaries and a higher cut-off, almost certainly north of $10 million.

The one thing which is most startling about this list is the number of women on it: exactly zero. (Update: It seems I missed one, Ros L’Esperance, #33.) One can’t help but suspect that the all-male culture at the upper reaches of Lehman was a corrosive and damaging thing, which in some way helped lead to the bank’s demise. Erin Callan, in 2007, was already a named corporate officer at Lehman, so she doesn’t make this list. (She was named CFO in September 2007.) From the outside, it looked as though Lehman had at least one woman in a senior leadership position. But looking at this list, it’s clear just how much of an exception Callan was.

Callan, it turns out, was the highly visible lone woman at Lehman, competing with and against nothing but men. I wonder what she thought, at the time, looking down this list, and seeing not but a single woman on it. At Lehman, it seems, in Dick Fuld’s immortal words, “the bros always wins”.